Dampier's party had marched in all 110 miles, over the most damnable and heart-breaking country which the mind of man can imagine. They had marched "heavy," with their guns and bags of dollars; and this in the rainy season. They had starved and suffered, and shivered and agonised, yet they had lost but two men, poor Gayny, who was drowned, and (apparently) one who had slipped away on the third day of the march. This man may have been the Spanish Indian. A note in Ringrose's narrative alludes to the capture of one of Dampier's party by the Spanish soldiers, and this may have been the man meant.
Two days later, when the Indian guides had gone, and the privateer was fit for the sea, they set sail for "the rendezvous of the fleet," which had been fixed for Springers' Key "another of the Samballoes Isles." Perhaps the English pirates hove up the anchor, the grand privilege of the guests, aboard ship, to the old anchor tune, with its mournful and lovely refrain--
"I'll go no more a-roving with you, fair maid."
The old band of never-strikes were outward bound on another foray.
As for Wafer, and his two companions, they stayed with the Indians for some days, living on plantains (given very grudgingly), and wondering whether the Indians would kill them. The natives were kindly, as a rule, to the French and English, but it was now the rainy season, when they liked to stay in their huts, about their fires. The pirates "had in a Manner awed the Indian guides they took ... and made them go with them very much against their Wills." The Indians had resented this act of the pirates, and as days went by, and the guides did not return, they judged that the white men had killed them. They prepared "a great Pile of Wood to burn us," says Wafer, meaning to avenge their fellows, whom they "had supposed dead." But a friendly old chief dissuaded them from this act, a few hours before the intended execution.
While the three were living thus, in doubt whether they would be speared, or held as slaves, or sold to the Spaniards, the two pirates, Spratlin and Bowman, who had been left behind at the Rio Congo, arrived at the village. They had had a terrible journey together, "among the wild Woods and Rivers," wandering without guides, and living on roots and plantains. On their way, they had come upon George Gayny "lying dead in a Creek where the Eddy had driven him ashore," "with the Rope twisted about him, and his Money at his Neck." They left the body where it lay, with its sack of silver dollars for which the poor man had come so far, and suffered so bitterly. They had no use for dollars at that time "being only in care how to work their way through a wild un-Known Country."